sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: nonfiction

You may or may not remember the news story of the birder in central park who was confronted by a white woman and threatened with police because he was black, in May 2020. This book is that black birder's memoir.

Overall, a good book, and one I'm glad I read. Christian Cooper is much more than "just" a black man and a birder. He's gay, he's a nerd, he's an activist, he's pagan, he loves travelling, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are a part of his life and shape who he is and how he reacted in that viral moment.

I really appreciated how he put that central park story near the end of the narrative, contextualising it in the rest of his life -- and then following it with a story about a similar confrontation in the same place just one year later contextualizes it even further. And also, that's not the end of his story. And I love how it ends! Tn the delight of always being able to see something new and learn something more about birds, no matter how long you've been a birder, and always being ready to throw yourself into the moment for it!

I do think the momentum in the book dragged a bit in the middle, plus I found it awkward how he made multiple references earlier in the book to the central park incident that made him famous; it makes the book feel too much of-the-moment, when a lot of what he's saying in this book is that that moment wasn't actually a bizarre outlier in his life as a whole.

But Cooper has led an interesting life, and I enjoyed hearing about it, and learnint about his time working for Marvel comics especially. He was part of the team working on Alpha Flight when the superhero Northstar came out as gay!

I listened to to this book as an audiobook, and Cooper narrates it himself. I like how his enthusiasm comes through in his reading, though whenever he tries put on a voice when doing dialogue for other people, it often comes out sounding loudly exasperated when he's aiming for high energy or high emotion, which is irritating.

One fun thing that the audiobook format allows is that at the beginning of each section of the book, there's an audio clip of birdsong, for a bird species that will be featured in that section of text! I really enjoyed trying to ID the bird from the song and then listening for when it would come up in one of his stories.

Overall, though it's not a perfect book, I am glad I read it and I think it's worth reading.

A nonfiction book I listened to as an audiobook. I went into it with the understanding that it's a memoir about a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on the perspective that spending SO many hours around the same pieces of art over years gave him. And it is that!

But it's also about more than that: what kinds of things led him to become a museum security guard, and about what the job of museum security job entails, and about people-watching and people-interacting. And, over all, about the huge impact of grief on a person's life. The author's brother died as a young adult, and it was in the aftermath of that loss that he decided he needed a job with less pressure than the kind of promising office job he'd had, one that would allow him time to process.

It's a beautiful book, thoughtful and meaningful and interesting. His reflections on art really are good! As is everything else! I loved it.

Edit: but also

pauraque has a really good point about the unexamined privilege in the pov the author is coming from in their review

I listened to this nonfiction book as an audiobook, which was a great way to spend time with the history of silk as I went about working on various fibre arts crafts myself! (no silk in my crafting stash, though. not in my budget!)

There was a lot to enjoy about the book - engaging writing, that covers many interesting stories from the history of silk. And it talks about much more than just the silk of the classic silkworm, too. People have gotten silk from other related types of moth cocoons, from certain shellfish (which use long silken strands to anchor themselves into sand), and from spiders, who create many different kinds of silk for different purposes. I particularly enjoyed learning about the many species of wild silk moths in India which have a long history of being harvested for their silks.

However, the further I listened in the book, the more striking it became that nearly all of the stories were told from a European perspective, about European priorities, even though most of the silks discussed are not European in origin. ( Read more... )

So as a whole I'm a lot less enthusiastic about this book now than I was when I was just starting it, which is really too bad. Read for the fun stories it does tell, but be aware going in that you are not actually getting the full world history of silk.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book, going into it. It's a nonfiction book about underworlds, but what did that mean, exactly? What approach was the author going to take?

It turned out that the approach was: Macfarlane, over a number of years, went and visited 10 different places where the human world intersects with the world beneath our feet, and used that to talk about the human relationships with those places, and why we use them and what for, and what the experience is like, and the history of them. Each chapter was on a different place, and was a deep dive into that place in particular, and then the cumulative effect of these different places was built up together to say something bigger.

It's a remarkably beautiful book, caring far more about the artistic qualities of the prose than most non-fiction books I read. It's so evocative and thoughtful at the same time! In each chapter he's so careful about building the narrative landscapes for each chapter, in the details he does or doesn't choose to include. I was surprised to discover in one late chapter that the author must be a birder, because he kept on referring to so many different kinds of birds he saw there, specifically by species name, but it had never come up before because birds weren't thematically relevant details in previous chapters!

The chapters include things like salt mining, cave art, tunnels beneath Paris, melt-holes in glaciers, and more. All of it was fascinating and thought-provoking and carefully researched, too.

My one and only point of disjoint in reading the book was in his chapter on nuclear containment, because in my opinion he seems too optimistic about the likelihood of containment methods working for the span of time they'll be needed. Like. Ten thousand years is an astoundingly long time! I have concerns!

But other than that, this is truly an excellent book, and I recommend it highly.

This month I read two non-fiction books by Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and Salt: A World History.

Both books are excellent at providing lots of historical details to give the reader a good sense of how vital each of these commodities was, and the scope of their effects on human cultures and industry. I particularly loved the book on cod, and it really made me want to try eating salt cod sometime to see what it's like!

I felt that the salt book was somewhat weaker, though. Sometimes the book was presenting information generally chronologically, sometimes it was focused on a particular location, sometimes it was following a particular product or trade over time or over space. It made it feel a bit jumbled and disorganized, going back and forward in time and hopping around the world. The cod book had a bit of that as well, but by the nature of the subject the issues were more limited so it wasn't as big a deal.

The salt book also had multiple particular details that got my back up.

One was the old chestnut about x species having not evolved for x number of millions of years, when talking about sturgeons. No, that's not how evolution works? like, yes sturgeons have maintained the same basic form for about 100 million years, because it's an extremely successful strategy for their context and continues to be so, but genetic changes will still happen in a population over so much time! probably if you took a modern sturgeon and a sturgeon from the cretaceous they would not even be able to interbreed!

The other was

palestine

that in a chapter about salt in Israel from ancient times to today, Palestinians weren't mentioned at all?! wtf, author!

Whoops I wrote this review ages ago and forgot to post it! Here you go.

Sohla is a chef and I've loved following her youtube career on various channels for the last few years -- she has such presence, vibrancy, obvious skill and passion. She seems to enjoy deliberately giving herself higher bars to reach, greater challenges to figure out how to work through, and it's such fun to watch.

And this recipe book has a neat premise -- it's not just a collection of recipes, but is designed to lead you through developing various skills in the kitchen as you work your way through the book. I enjoy that this means the recipes are organised by technique instead of by what stage of the meal it's to be eaten at; a different way of organizing a cookbook than the standard, but I think it makes just as much sense this way!

Unfortunately a lot of the recipes turned out to be ones I have no interest in, whether featuring ingredients I don't enjoy eating, or ingredients I'm not willing to pay for, or having processes that require owning a stand mixer. As a result I can't go through the book as she intended. So I ended up just skimming through it and then putting it aside, though I did save a few recipes to try later.

I think that if you're a person with more interest than me in seafood and/or dairy, this could be a really good book for you! And from what I see I think it does a very good job of teaching various skills. But as it is, for me, I'll go back to just watching Sohla on youtube.

A non-fiction book about racism and particularly anti-Black racism in Canada, by activist writer Desmond Cole.

I am a Canadian myself, but honestly, so much of the anti-racism rhetoric I hear is still so thoroughly based in a US context, given the English speaking media environment and online world are so US-dominated in a lot of ways. So it was helpful to read a book that was clearly and specifically talking about the Canadian context, with discussion about the Canadian activism being done and the Canadian police force's use of violence with impunity and the like. Canada likes to think of ourselves as being better than the US, but that's an extremely low bar and lets Canada think there's no work that needs to be done here when there's SO much that needs addressing.

A good and worthwhile read.

A charming little non-fiction book about pigeons, written and illustrated by the person behind the fabulous Bird & Moon comics. The writing is a bit on the simplistic side, but that's understandable since it's written to a pretty broad audience, and the art is super charming, plus it definitely succeeded at making me want to pay more attention to pigeons! Unfortunately my city is actually remarkably low on pigeons to look at :( Genuinely cannot remember the last time I saw a pigeon from close enough to see any details on it.

It's a graphic novel memoir of growing up trans, and like, eh, it's perfectly fine, competently done, no complaints about it, but it just....idk, didn't have enough there to really engage me deeply? I guess it's more for an audience of either nervous baby trans people or of cis people Trying To Understand. Which is fine and good! But I'm not either of those things.

This is a nonfiction biography of a woman who was an amateur scientist in pretty much the end of the era when you could have a successful career publishing academic articles without formal credentials, and only the beginning of the era when women could have a successful career in academia. She was born to Swedish nobility, her first husband died in the Russian revolution, she was a nurse to the famous Dionne Quintuplets, and she spent decades living in a tiny cabin in the woods in northern ontario taking intensive observations of birds.

A fascinating woman! But obviously I read this book because BIRDS. And it does mostly focus on her life after she falls headfirst into what became her true life's work of studying and understanding birds. I loved reading about her passion, her efforts, her extensive correspondence with bird experts across north america, her growing and deep familiarity with all the birds of her area, her dedication to keeping careful records of everything she saw and heard. Some of the things she studied continue to be relevant to ornithologists today!

But one through-line in the book was Louise's knowledge of the declining numbers of songbirds over the years, even from the very earliest days of her birding efforts in the 1930's. She knew, too, that the declining numbers were due to human activity, and she mourned their loss. Near the end of the book, the reader is provided with some numbers of just how great the decline in songbirds has been from when Louise began her records to now in the 2020's and it is honestly heartbreaking. Even just within Louise's life, she talks about the obvious and stark change in the experience of the morning bird chorus. It brings me near tears to think of how things used to be! Between habitat loss in both breeding grounds and wintering grounds, the effects of herbicides and insecticides, disappearing food due to the collapsing insect population, and more, songbird presence is a shadow of what it once was.

The other important thing I learned from the book is that the things I want to know about birds ARE out there, I just need to acquire bird books that are focused on specific species or specific families, instead of field guides, if I want to know everything about a bird's life and behaviour. NOTED. My bird library WILL be growing.

I seem to be going on a bit of a nonfiction spree this month for some reason. I think I've read as much nonfiction this month as all last year!

This one is about how fascism works, surprise surprise! It's a clear, cogent, thoughtful read, and full of helpful examples drawn from history and from various countries' fascist trends in the current political climate. It's very readable and very distressing.

The author is Jewish and clearly feels strongly about the topic, and for good reason; and that passion, backed up by a strong commitment to evidence-based arguments, makes it a powerful read.

(Note that this book quotes hate speech from fascists, including slurs and various dehumanizing and violent language, so be warned to expect that.)

The book is written as a call to action, to be able to recognize and resist fascism when you see it. It was published in 2018 and continues to be unpleasantly timely.

A solid, research-based book about all the ways that diet culture hurts people, how inescapable and insidious it can be, and how best to free yourself from the harm it causes.

This is a message that honestly SO many people need. Diet talk - and its current iteration, "wellness" talk - is everywhere, as is size discrimination and fatphobia. But a) sustainable long-term weight loss is almost impossible for almost everyone, because your body loves you and wants to keep you alive through famines, b) you can be healthy at any size, and c) weight cycling and experiencing weight stigma are the factors that are actually associated with greater health risks, independent of the actual size of your body.

There were a few place in the part where the book goes through the history of weight and dieting where I think it simplified things a bit much, but this book's overall goal isn't to be a history book, it's to show people how to have a non-guilty, non-shaming, comfortable relationship with food and eating and their body. And it does a great job at that. Highly recommended read.

This is a graphic novel memoir written by a person of my generation about eir relationship with gender over the course of eir life. Kobabe is genderqueer and seems to be somewhere on the ace spectrum and grew up in fandom, just like me, and grew up with similar cultural references and touchpoints. I've spent so much of my life reading books written in bygone eras (whether a decade or two centuries out of date!) that seeing a book where the author's life seems familiar is honestly odd, lol! But eir relationship with eir body and gender and sexuality is all ultimately very different than mine, as is eir family and the context in which e grew up. And e mostly hung out in different fandoms than me, too!

Anyway Kobabe is clearly skilled at comics and I enjoyed reading this journey through eir experiences, and it's clearly brave of em to put this out into the world, and it's just nice to have more narratives of the ways that queer experiences can look!

The book does feel like it ends a little abruptly, but the author was 30 or so at the time of publishing and that's still honestly early in one's journey through life, so it's perhaps not surprising that there isn't a satisfying conclusion to wrap it all up with, and it's still a good ending.

This is a small book from the 70's written from a very christian perspective but speaking earnestly to anyone who cares about injustice, urging people to act to make a difference. It's a plea for revolutionary change, but one that argues for non-violent action -- not necessarily from a moral ground (though I think he also believes it morally), but from a belief that non-violent direct action is more likely to be effective at creating the world he wants to see. How can oppressed minorities successfully wage a war of violence against the powers that have all the money and arms and armies, he asks.

The book is a collection of small essays and small poems interspersed with each other. The poetry isn't as good, in my opinion, as the essays, but they're clearly heartfelt at least.

The book does use sexist language and says the occasional awkward or uncomfortable thing, but it's clear that Câmara is genuinely doing his best to be open and expansive with his love, his understanding, and his welcome, and so I was able to read past this myself. He seems to just genuinely love humankind!

It's also very clearly of its era in other ways, like the particular political framework he's discussing throughout of communism vs capitalism. And also, this is the time when liberation theology was blossoming in Latin America, and it's clear he's writing out of that tradition too. I have a lot of respect for liberation theology!

Overall an interesting look into a particular era and a particular perspective in the ongoing efforts to change the world into a better place.

I've seen this recommended many times, and this is the year! I was expecting A Room of One's Own to be a straightforward book-length essay arguing about the ways a culture of misogyny has gotten in the way of women's writing and the things women need to be successful writers, but it's got a much more interesting structure and approach than that. Woolf uses the conceit of telling the story of a particular (fictional) day in the life of a woman and the things she experienced and thought about over the course of that day, in order to both straightforwardly argue points like I expected but also to just, like, put forward the realities of women's experiences for the reader to ponder upon and draw their own conclusions.

It's fascinating, it's compellingly written, it's extremely more-ish. It's full of both things where I'm like "YEAH YOU'RE SO RIGHT, BRING IT" and things where I desperately want to argue with Woolf, but like, argue (affectionate). And I'm pretty confident that's what she was going for, tbh!! An invigorating read, and now I want to read more things by Woolf.

Oof. The kind of book where you finish and have to just kind of sit in a daze for a while as you let it settle.

This is a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant fame, about her two years working in the oil sands of Alberta when she was a fresh university graduate - a very young woman working in an isolated environment that was mostly men separated from their communities. It's a wonderful, nuanced look at a complicated and difficult place, and Kate's writing and art and impeccable sense of pacing do an amazing job of carrying you with her into the emotions of the moment, in everything she depicts.

Not sure what else to say about it, really. Book good. Very recommend. Content notes for sexual harassment and sexual assault.

I've been having a grand time reading this book a few pages a day for months, and I finally reached the end! It calls itself an "advanced" birding book, which at first intimidated me because I thought it meant I had to be advanced to understand what it was saying, but no, it's a book that is designed to take any birder and teach them the skills needed to become more advanced.

I loved the underlying mindset of the book, that the best way to be a birder is to bird in the way that makes you happy, and a good birder is a birder who finds joy in the experience, however they approach it. And this book is merely meant to be a resource for the kind of birder who's into getting really careful and detailed about bird ID, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to bird, and this approach isn't for everyone.

But this approach IS for MEEEEE.

The book starts with an extensive section teaching you things that are relevant to ID for any type of bird: about the structure of feathers in wing, tail, and body; about molting and other changes to feather appearance over time; about behaviour; about songs and calls; and so forth. Then it goes on to illustrate its principles by discussing specific groups of birds for whom ID can be challenging, and what you can do to help you better understand what you're seeing in these contexts.

The example birds are all North American, so it's a book that may be best for a North American birder, but the first section is relevant for birders no matter where they live and what birds they're looking at.

I found it very engagingly written, not dry at all, and I have learned SO much from it. I have started looking at birds in a whole new way since getting into this book, and it's added so much to my birding experience!

I also appreciate that it's very practical, discussing what you're likely to experience in real world contexts, and what to do about it. So for example in the chapter on seabirds, it's like, you're almost certainly going to only ever see these birds in the context of a chartered birding experience on a boat, with an expert on board to point things out, so here's some good ways to help you to make the most of that context.

I will admit I did a bit of skimming in the chapter on Empidonax flycatchers. The author makes it clear in a number of places throughout the book that sometimes the correct ID answer to a bird you see is "there isn't enough information available to me to make a certain ID" and that is particularly emphasised in the Empids. For a number of Empids you can only really be certain about your ID if you hear the voice, because they look so similar and the amount of visible variation within a species can overlap so much with the variation between species. So reading through careful descriptions of what kinds of barely noticeable field marks MIGHT be a mildly useful sign in pointing towards one Empid over another just....didn't feel worthwhile to me personally to spend that many pages on, at least at this stage of my birding skills. It's possible I'll feel differently once I have a lot more experience in looking at birds and recognizing extremely subtle variation, and then I can come back to Empids and feel like it's an exciting challenge instead of a "wow no thank you."

But other than the Empids I read through every page with fascination, even for birds that live in parts of North America that are nowhere near me, because it was still teaching me more about how to look at birds, even if that particular bird isn't relevant to me.

And I will definitely be regularly referring to this book in the future for help with some of these difficult-to-ID groups!

I first heard about this book a few years ago, before I first became interested in birding, but was intrigued by it because of the history and context. Birding in a Western context originated with the approach of going out into the field to shoot birds, and then taking the dead birds home with you to analyse in detail for identification. But in the late 19th century there was a movement to change this, because enthusiasts all going out to kill birds is not actually good for the well-being of birds. And this book was written with that agenda in mind: to convince readers that it is worthwhile to examine live birds in the field, and then leave them be.

When I tried reading it at the time I first heard of it, though, I very quickly became bored of it and gave up. But recently it occurred to me that the book might read better to someone who has an intrinsic love of birds properly installed, and gave it another try - and it was so worth it!

It's fascinating to compare this book to modern field guides. Its approach is so different! Of course, due to the type of printing available at the time, detailed full-colour images of every bird can't reasonably be included, so there are just a few black and white drawings here and there. But also the information provided in the text itself is so different! This is where your can really see its agenda. It earnestly takes its time to tell you personalized individual little stories about times the author has encountered these birds, and what an interesting and charming experience it was. It also spends a lot of time describing the birds' personalities, in very human-like ways! But of course it does. It wants to convince the reader that the birds are worth keeping alive.

The other information it provides is more haphazard. It nearly always takes the time to discuss habitats, nesting habits, and something of appearance, but the level of detail is wildly variable, and it's rarely sufficient that I would feel confident in identifying a bird based on the description. Sometimes the author attempts to convey what the bird's songs and calls sound like, but it's hopeless to give meaningful information on this through the medium of text, though it's clear when the author thinks it's particularly important for a bird that you know what it sounds like, and is really earnestly trying to help you out. Too bad the Merlin app didn't exist in 1889!

And it makes some very odd choices about how to organise its information. For example: its discussion of the different orders and families to which birds belong is.....in the section on chipping sparrows, more than 60 pages into the book. Then the classifications are mentioned on and off, inconsistently, until they're summarized as a whole in the section on thrushes at page 195. What the heck! It makes it clear that the expected use of the book is to read it front to back, rather than just to pick it up as a reference to figure out a particular bird you're seeing. Though the back does have some....mildly useful appendices for looking up birds by specific characteristic.

But the nesting habits and behaviour descriptions are actually nice to have (even if they're couched in flowery victorian nature-writing language) because modern field guides don't seem to tend to include that information, just details on appearance and a brief suggestion of habitat, with only occasional additional info. Modern field guides want to fit as many birds as possible into as pocket-sized a book as possible, and so they keep their text very short, and I do think this is too bad!

I also loved getting the insights into some of the old or more regional names for some of the birds, instead of just the official name you get in modern field guides! "Bee martin" for kingbird! "Chippy" for chipping sparrow! "Crow blackbird" for grackle! "Yellow hammer" and a whole collection of other options for the northern flicker! (in fact I had to go look this one up in Merlin using the description given for the yellow hammer to determine for sure which bird was being referred to, because "northern flicker" isn't among any of the names given for the bird in this book!)

It also has fun little bits of sass (for example, when it talks about the chipping sparrow's song, it says the bird has a "cheerful perseverance that would grace a better cause," lol) but sometimes in its efforts to personify the birds it's pretty mean. The author clearly doesn't think highly of flycatchers for example, and I felt very indignant. "All the disagreeable qualities of the flycatchers seem to centre in this bird," it says about the kingbird, and I'm just like HOW RUDE. HOW DARE YOU. YOU'RE SO WRONG.

At any rate I'm very glad that this book was written at the time it was for the purpose it was, and it was an enjoyable look into a different era of birding, despite its foibles!

Bernadette Banner is someone who I've been following on youtube for uhhh years at this point I think, because I just find her pleasant to watch and listen to, but I have never found her on-video instructions to be entirely clear to follow, so this book about how to sew is a wonderful addition to the Bernadette Banner oeuvre and I'm definitely glad I bought it. It has good clear photos and explanations showing you exactly what to do for everything it's teaching!

I've been sewing since I was a child, taught the basics on how to use a sewing machine and follow a commercial pattern by my mother, and then have picked up various useful sewing skills piecemeal on my own as an adult. This way of learning to sew leaves you with gaps in your knowledge, and so although in a lot of ways Banner's book is far more introductory than I need, in other ways it taught me EXACTLY the simple obvious little things that I really ought to have already known.

Like for example you're supposed to sharpen your tailor's chalk! that makes so much sense! how did I never think of that myself??

Also I have now learned how to properly anchor your thread when beginning to hand-sew, instead of always using a knot like I previously did. And the knot would never hold through the weave, so I'd double my thread and knot it together at the end so I could come through the loop to fully anchor my thread, which means that I've always had to sew with doubled thread. Maybe now I can Not do that!

I have also always done french seams the hard way, sewing the actual garment seam first and then caaaaaarefully folding in the seam allowance inside and awkwardly pinning it so I can sew the two sides of the seam allowance together with the raw edges enclosed, and the Actual way you're supposed to do it makes so much more sense, lol. Though also I am over french seaming, and turning and felling is the way to go imo - or just whip stitching the seam allowance together if it doesn't need the full security of turning and felling or french seaming.

And I love how Banner demonstrates how to put a really tidy looking patch onto a hole in a garment! It looks so good and so sturdy as well when done that way! And her tips on how to add a gusset to fix the armscye of a purchased shirt where lifting your arm lifts the whole shirt is a GREAT way to improve the fit of mass-market clothes and I think I'm highly likely to do this in the future.

I also enjoyed the little one-page essays by guest contributors she included throughout, from people of various backgrounds and identities and experiences, to make it clear to the reader that sewing or mending your own clothes can be for ANYONE, not just white cis conventionally-attractive not-visibly-disabled women like Banner herself. Banner always makes an effort to be thoughtfully inclusive and I love that about her.

An excellent choice for my first purchase of a how-to-sew manual as someone who already sews.

Yes I continue to make my way through books on the various hugo lists for the year without pause! This one's a nonfiction book exploring the realities of ableism through the author's experiences as a Deafblind woman. It's a little bit memoirish, but does not come anywhere near telling her full life story, and it's organized by theme rather than chronologically.

It's written largely to a non-disabled audience, is my general impression of it, to provide a thorough grounding in just what it's like to exist in society when your body is not what that society wants or expects. Sjunnesun does a great job of this, I think, and she writes clearly and with passion. I read the whole book in one sitting. Probably a bad idea, especially after melting my brain with the Debarkle over the last few days, because now I don't have enough brain left to say smart things about this book, but: it's good!